Today, Explained - Joe Versus the Volcano

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

While it might feel as though nothing could be worse than last night’s presidential debate, Vox’s Ezra Klein explains what could happen if President Trump loses the election and refuses to leave office. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Just a warning before we start. Today's episode features coverage of last night's presidential debate. We'll begin in a moment. 2020, 2020, 2020. What to say about last night's presidential debate? There's nothing happening there. All right, gentlemen, it was... It was terrible.

Much later, Joe. Much later. Mr. President, can I finish? The answer to the question is no. It was... Will you shut up, man? Mr. President, sir, I mean, it's absolutely not true. It was unpresident man? Mr. President. Sir, with a billion dollars, if you had rid of him, you know what, you're not true. It was unpresidential. True.

Gentlemen. It was like watching a bully steal a kid's Beyblades, but worse, because... There's nothing smart about you, Joe. 47 years you've been... Because the bully is... And if you would have had... Let me just tell you something, Joe.

President of... Number two. President of the United States. the bully is president of president of the United States. This is a horrible thing for our country. It was a travesty. This is not going to end well. It was a travesty of

American democracy in a year where we've had plenty. We got a lot to unpack here, gentlemen. We got a lot of time. Ugh. Lizzo, you covered the debate for Vox. Why? So it's a good question. It was ultimately a huge mess.

What we saw was Trump steamrolling and speaking over anyone and anything in his path, including both Joe Biden as well as moderator Chris Wallace. Chris, that was the worst part of Obama. Let me ask my question. Well, I'll ask Joe. The individual mandate was the most unpopular aspect of Obamacare. I got rid of it. I'd like you to. And we will protect people. Mr. President, I'm the moderator of this debate. We also got a really concentrated look at how little substance Trump

is continuing to bring to many different areas of policy. He did not have a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. He did not take accountability for the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have resulted from coronavirus. It's China's fault. It should have never happened. And the attacks that he levied against Joe Biden were mostly based on unfounded and unrelated claims, including questions about Joe Biden's smarts. Did you use the word smart? So you said you went to Delaware State, but you forgot the name of your college. You didn't go to Delaware State. You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class. Don't ever use the word smart with me. Don't go to Delaware State. You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class. Don't ever use the word smart with me. Don't ever use that word. Oh, give me a break.

I think a lot of people watching last night probably pretty quickly started to wonder why these two people were even on a stage debating each other and why any of us would watch. Does it make sense to do this with President Trump? This is a question that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually raised a couple of weeks ago. I wouldn't legitimize a conversation with him. Her argument was that Biden shouldn't even debate Trump because it would legitimize the president and it would give him a platform to lie, to bluster, and to bully whoever else was there with him. He will also belittle what the debates are supposed to be about. And that's effectively what we saw happen last night.

And to your point, it really does raise the question of whether this format is a good one for having legitimate conversation about policy, about the presidency with somebody like Trump. Maybe they can just give the moderators the ability to like cut off his mic when it's Biden's turn to speak or the moderators turn to speak. Well, the Commission on Presidential Debates actually announced today that they're considering structural changes to future debates because of everything that happened last night. They haven't announced, however, what exactly those tweaks are going to look like. Okay, hopefully sweeping. Maybe a mute button can just be the moderator. Did you manage to, like,

pull any substantive details from all the crosstalk and yelling and Trump's bullying? There was very little policy talk. We addressed health care a little bit and how a Supreme Court case could unravel the Affordable Care Act. And there was some talk about climate policy. I want crystal clean water and air. But again, it was very little and broad. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland? The moment that stood out most in the debate was when President Trump refused to outright condemn white supremacists. Are you prepared to do that?

I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing. He was given an opportunity to do so. And not only did he not take it, he went further and said. What do you want to call him? Give me a name. Give me a white supremacist. And would you like me to condemn white supremacists and white proud boys? Stand back and stand by. Stand back and stand by to a group called the Proud Boys, which is a far right hate group that's known for inciting violence. And his comments were taken by them as they later, you know, talked about on social media as effectively an endorsement of what they do.

Let's pull one of those up. This is one of the reactions minutes after the president started talking about this. Yes, sir. Proud boys standing by. So not only did he not reject white supremacists, it appeared that he helped kind of fuel that movement even further last night. Let's please continue on. Another moment that really stuck out to me was when the president wouldn't even acknowledge the service and death of Beau Biden. And speaking of my son, the way you talk about the military, the way you talk about them being losers and being and just being suckers. My son was in Iraq. Joe Biden was in the middle of a pretty emotional statement

about his son, Beau, who has passed away and about his service in the military. He was a patriot, and the people left behind there were heroes. And I resent White House. I'm talking about my son, Beau Biden. You're talking about... I don't know Beau. I know Hunter. Hunter got thrown out of the military.

Trump didn't acknowledge what Joe Biden was referring to and instead decided to put on a direct attack of Hunter Biden, who is also Joe Biden's son. That attack is something he's used a lot in the past. So it in itself is unsurprising. But the tonality and the context of which he talked about it, as Joe Biden is? I mean, obviously, the Trump administration and the Trump campaign have been trying to paint Joe Biden as unfit to serve as president. How did he perform in the debate? Joe Biden attempted as best as he could to stay above the fray and make clear statements that he wanted to make about reopening after the coronavirus, about his own clean energy policy and things of that nature. Some of his strongest moments were actually ones where he was directly addressing the camera. So it looked like he was making eye contact with whoever the viewer was

at home. How many of you were in a situation where you lost your mom or dad and you couldn't even speak to them? You had a nurse holding a phone up so you could, in fact, say goodbye. You would have lost far more people. And that was strikingly effective in what he did and what little he was able to do amidst the chaos of the evening. He also refused to answer a couple of questions. Why do you think he took that approach? There were areas where he dodged, including on a question about the filibuster and packing the court. And part of that is because that topic right now is quite contentious, even among Democrats. And so it's likely he did not want to put a stake in the ground one way or another. Let me move on to questions about the future. I suppose the most important question of the night was saved until very late in the night,

so maybe some people may have missed it, but Chris Wallace did ask the president again if he would commit to the peaceful transfer of power. Will you urge your supporters to stay calm during this extended period, not to engage in any civil unrest? And will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified? President Trump, you go first. I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully. And the president again seemed to sort of dodge the question and cast more doubt. I am urging my people. I hope it's going to be a fair election.

If it's a fair election, I am 100 percent on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that. And I'll tell you what, from a common sense, I'll tell you what it means. It means you have a fraudulent election. He again made completely unsubstantiated claims about how mail-in voting adds to voter fraud and that how it can't be trusted as a method of voting, which is particularly concerning because that's going to be one of the predominant ways that people are able to submit their ballots, given everything that's happening with coronavirus right now. So, yes, Trump continued to add to concerns that people have had about his willingness to accept the result of the election

and cast doubt on the ways that people are able to participate in it as well. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about something even worse than last night's debate. President Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. Gentlemen, I think this is so un-presidential. It's Today Explained. Thank you. Number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself.

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contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. As reclined, President Trump once again refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power if he loses last night. He once again cast doubt on the results of an election that has already started and will take another several weeks at least. What happens if he refuses to go? So there are different versions of this. So one version is that Joe Biden wins, and everybody knows Joe Biden won. And there's Donald Trump on Twitter being like, well, I heard on OANN that there was this one place where somebody lit a Trump ballot on fire or something. So there's a world where Trump is isolated in this.

And that's a world where what you probably see from him is angry tweets, you know, maybe in the Trump fever swamps, there are people making the case that Trump won, right? There were Democrats in 2004 making the case that it was die-ball machines that stole the election from John Kerry. And it just doesn't go anywhere, right? Donald Trump becomes a kind of crank conspiracy player in American politics, like forever insisting he won the election. That's like a best-case scenario?

I think it's a good-case scenario. Here's a real scenario that I think is possible. Florida is not expected to have a late night. The way they do mail-in and other things, I think that's true for Ohio too. Biden is ahead in the polls in both places. He could just win Florida and Ohio pretty early in the night, and we're not dealing with any of this. So I think it is worth saying that if you just read the polls, the likely thing is Biden

wins by such a margin. There's really no question here. The harder question becomes, what if there is something that happens in the election? Some irregularity that creates confusion, where Donald Trump is saying he won, but it looks like a number of properly cast ballots have been thrown out. Or conversely, Donald Trump lost, clearly lost, but there's something, there's some story, there's some something that is giving him and a critical mass of elected Republicans room to claim that he didn't, room to claim that this was flawed, room to claim that this was somehow rigged.

And it's there, in a world where Trump has some institutional backing, that things can get very dangerous. I can't say this clearly enough. What makes Trump dangerous is not Donald Trump. It is the enabling force of the rest of the Republican Party. If the rest of the Republican Party throughout his presidency had not been willing to enable him, then his presidency would have either been over long ago or curbed in a very different way. It will really matter what players like Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Fox News, for that matter, think and do in those hours. So whether or not they have bought into whatever Trump's view of this is, is going to be really, really consequential. Trump himself, I think, is very unlikely to respect anything that is short of a

landslide against him. But a lot of these other players will and have at other points. And so, I think that's going to be really the key variable. Okay. So, in a situation where Trump loses, but there are irregularities he can point to and cast doubt on, and that situation where you've got Republicans in the House and the Senate who are somewhat backing him and the argument that the election may have been illegitimate. What happens then? We do not have a real system for deciding any of this in a legitimate way. It is not that I don't have an answer for that, Sean. It is that there is not an answer for that. The American system of government, one of its truly fatal flaws is that it does not have ways of legitimately resolving

disputes at that level between different branches and different parties. So there are versions of this where it comes down to a particular question, like, should there be a recount in Florida? And maybe that is ultimately sent to the Supreme Court. And then imagine a world where the deciding vote on that is cast by Amy Coney Barrett. Would Democrats find that to be legitimate? I mean, it would have been decided, but would that have been a legitimate decision that the Supreme Court nominee, Trump and McConnell, just jammed through at the last minute in violation of McConnell's own principles from a couple years before, just handed the election to their benefactor? I don't think Democrats would hold that. I think something people do not consider enough when thinking about these scenarios, all of the attention right now is on what if Donald Trump does not think the outcome of the election is legitimate? There's been almost none on what if Democrats don't think it is legitimate?

And I think sometimes we can, in the media, sort of bought into the mythos of America the way that we are, we can pretend or act as if any claim of illegitimacy would itself be illegitimate. Because Trump, in making these preemptive claims of illegitimacy, like that mail-in balloting is all a fraud, that is ridiculous. But you can have elections stolen. You can have particularly incumbent players leverage their power and leverage their relationships in institutions like the Supreme Court to decide elections in their favor. You can argue that happened during Bush v. Gore, but I think there's a good case that Bush semi-won that election. But in a world where Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose a popular vote quite

dramatically, no matter what happens, and then you have a contested election where maybe you have something like 2% to 3% of mail-in ballots rejected in key states with those rejections falling disproportionately on Democratic voters. And then do Democrats accept that? And should they accept that is also a really hard problem. And not one with an obvious answer and not one that you can like really even say until you know what the situation is, but we do not have, there is not a mechanism that is not party-driven that can decide that. There is nobody who is trusted by both sides who can come in and say what is fair, or if it wasn't fair, call a redo.

Democrats have committed to the peaceful transfer of power. People like Mitch McConnell have stressed how important the peaceful transfer of power is. President Trump, as we saw last night in the debate, has no problem lying. Why not just lie and say, sure, yeah, I'm committed to the peaceful transfer of power? How important is it that he won't even lie and say he believes in this storied, glorified American institution? I mean, look, man, we're four years into this. We elected somebody who fundamentally doesn't believe

in the American political experiment. And he has never hid that fact. Remember, this question got asked in 2016 too. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle? What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense. Well, Chris, let me respond to that because that's horrifying. You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is is rigged against him. Now, it didn't end up happening because Hillary Clinton lost and conceded.

But Donald Trump, I mean, what I will say almost in his defense is he never hides what he is. There's no strategic cynicism here, no disguising the ball. I talked on the Ezra Klein show last night in my post-debate rap with Matt Iglesias about this poem Donald Trump used to recite on the campaign trail called The Snake. And it's a takeoff. It's a version of an old fable people know that I knew as the scorpion and the frog. But, you know, take a snake. The snake asks you to take it across the river.

Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in for heaven's sake. Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in for heaven's sake. Take me in, oh tender woman. Side the vicious snake. And then it bites you. And now I'm going to die. Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grin. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in. And Trump would tell that story to talk about immigrants. But it has always, in my view,

been the most profound commentary on Trump himself. He's never hidden who he is. He's never hidden what he is. He doesn't disguise himself behind a lot of glittering rhetoric. You don't have to look hard to see what he's really doing. It's all out there. He lets you know. But I think the thing that people are worried about right now is the peaceful part of that equation. Sean, I don't have a way to make people not worried. I'm not here to make you feel better. You shouldn't feel good.

I guess a question I have is, should people be focused on making sure as much as a citizen can that, you know, he or she is voting, that that vote is counted, that other people are being helped to vote? Or should Americans be, you know, buying boards and hammers and nails and weapons for what could be some sort of constitutional crisis that has, you know, people out in the streets ready to commit violence? Because I think a lot of people have that question right now. I would just say that the peaceful transfer of power is not simply something that is guaranteed. It is something that has to be continually guaranteed. And so it is important that people do not think their responsibility to our democracy ends with voting.

And it's worth knowing that we've had many moments in America where we either did lose control, like the Civil War, or we almost lost control, like the election of 1800. And in these cases, it has taken either the brave intercession of a set of political leaders, like, for instance, Republicans going to Richard Nixon and saying, you have to resign or we will remove you. Or it has taken the American people much more broadly in a mass way, rising up. Like, I am not here to tell you this is just going to happen on autopilot. It may not. I'm not saying, like, get ready. I'm definitely not saying board up your windows.

Don't hide. Most people want America to keep going. Most people want Donald Trump to not be president. But I don't love sitting and contemplating these scenarios because they're terrible scenarios. They are scenarios with no good outcome. Only bad ones and worse ones. My hope, and that's why I think you see people like joe biden just up there saying like vote like the thing to do right now is vote like my hope is that there is such a decisive judgment

on election day frankly i think people can pretty easily figure out um which candidate i would prefer to win this election but if trump wins i hope it is clear. I really do. Like, the outcomes I want here are either Joe Biden wins and it is obvious, or Trump wins and it is obvious. The outcomes I fear here are murkiness. Thank you, Ezra. I imagine we'll be in touch. Ezra Klein is the host of another Vox podcast. It's called The Ezra Klein Show. You can find much more coverage of last night's shit show

from Ezra and Lee and many more of our colleagues over at Vox.com. And with all the disinformation about voting floating around, who could blame you if you were confused about your deadlines, your options, any of it? Head over to Vox.com slash vote to clear up any confusion ahead of this election. Again, it's vox.com slash vote. Let's please continue on.